Nigel Tranter - The Wisest Fool

The Duchess drew a deep breath, to raise her splendid bosom, opened her lips to speak and then thought better of it With a glare at the girl and a mere nod at Heriot, she swept out of the room as proudly as she had entered. The man cleared his throat, blinking his surprise.

The girl was very young to have got rid of so formidable a lady, little more than a child indeed, of a slim, boyish figure, great lively eyes, not really pretty but with a gamin attractiveness and a most engaging and ready smile. "This way, if you please," she invited.

"H'mm. You are surprisingly, er, effective, young woman," he said. "You accomplished in two moments what I had been unable to do in ten minutes!"

She grinned widely, showing excellent, regular teeth. 'The Duchess is perhaps less successful with her own sex than she is with yours, sir!"

"Indeed " Absorbing the implications of this, and from a chit of a girl who looked scarcely past school age, Heriot followed her out into the arras-hung corridor. "You are new in the Queen's service, I think? In fact, I am sure of it I would scarce have overlooked you, i' faith!"

"Yes, sir. I am Her Grace's newest Maid-in-Waiting. Alison Primrose by name."

'Primrose? That is not a common name. Are you sib to James Primrose, Clerk to the Privy Council, perhaps?"

"My she, sir. As he is to eighteen others!" And her laugh rang out along the corridor, clear and uninhibited.

"Ah." Heriot had heard of the little lawyer's abounding brood -no doubt an excellent whetstone on which this child had had to sharpen her wits and polish her assurance.

She seemed to read his thoughts. "After my family, Mistress Gray told the Queen that I would find her service but little trouble," she confided. "Duchesses and countesses the least of it!" "Mistress Gray? She was in this?"

"Why yes, sir. She is my good friend. And has no little weight with Her Grace."

So this was Mary Gray's contact within the Queen's household? As adept as her father, probably, at gaining information and influencing events-a shrewder choice than the Duchess of Lennox, for sure. He would keep an eye on Alison Primrose-and no great hardship, either.

A blast of hot and distinctly stuffy air met him as the girl threw open the door of the royal bedchamber and announced him cheerfully.

The large room was as untidy as it was overheated, with a huge log fire blazing in a twelve-feet-wide open hearth, despite the warm April morning, clothes, furs and women's things littered everywhere, chests open and spilling, small dogs squabbling and yapping, and the great bed itself a heap of disarranged linen, covers and pillows, in which Anne and two dogs sat.

"Master Geordie, good Master Geordie!" the Queen cried, in the thick and guttural accent she never quite lost. "Why you are come I do not know. But you are welcome. It is good to see an honest man's face, a man I can trust" And she extended a be-ringed hand to him, over the dogs and bedclothes.

He bowed deeply and moved forward to take and kiss the outstretched hand.

George Heriot was a noticing man, but he did not have to be to wonder what the Queen had been doing while he waited for her to be ready to receive him. For her long hair was still in an uncombed cascade about her shoulders, and under the loose and gaping purple bed-robe she was most evidently entirely naked, her swollen breasts and distended belly very visible and not particularly enticing. Admittedly she wore bracelets as well as the many rings, which flashed with diamonds, rubies and sapphires-of Heriot's own providing-but they might well have been on all night. She was a thin-faced, sharp-eyed, long-nosed and chinned young woman, still only twenty-seven, with a high brow, not beautiful but with a very white alabaster skin, a lively manner and an air of breeding. Heriot noticed something else. The pillows and bedclothes to the Queen's left clearly showed that she had had a bedfellow until very recently. He did not really suspect it to have been a man.

"You may go, Primrose," Anne said, and the girl bowed herself out. There was however a faint hint of movement, of a presence, from an open-doored dressing-room adjoining.

"I rejoice to see Your Grace. And looking well," the man said. "I bring you a letter from the King. Also messages of His Grace's love and warm attachment His wishes that all should go most well with your affairs."

The Queen took the proffered letter but dropped it on the covers. "His Grace is but little concerned with my well-being, I think," she said briefly. "That is not why he sent you, I swear."

"H'rr'mm. Your Grace must not think that. It is wholly because of his thought and care for you that I am here, I promise you…"

"Has he sent orders for my son Frederick to be delivered to me? From that wicked old woman. My first-born. Only if he has will I believe in his love and attachment, Master Geordie."

Heriot cleared his throat. "Er, not yet. Not exactly that, Madam…"

'Then his messages are of no interest to me!" Passionately she said it. "He is a cruel and wicked man, and no true husband. How can he separate a mother from her children so? He is a monster, a heartless monster!"

"Your Grace-he is none so ill as that! Because Prince Henry is heir to the throne, the King is concerned lest men of ill will lay hands on him, use him for their own ends, against the Crown. As indeed they did to himself, as a boy. At Ruthven. He cannot have that to happen. So he keeps him in the secure fortress of Stirling, in the care of the Mars. Lady Mar was his own foster-mother, her son, the present Earl, the King's oldest friend, almost as good as a brother…"

"And both of them hate me, the Queen! Frederick's mother." It was one of the oddities of the Scottish Court that the Queen Insisted that her older son was named Frederick, after her father the King of Denmark, while James named him Henry as gesture towards Elizabeth and her father Henry the Eighth, in his gropings towards the coveted English succession. Which had come first at the christening, only Bishop Cunningham of Aberdeen knew for sure, who had diplomatically mumbled the names. "Highness-I do believe that you mistake. It is not so…"

"You think not? Then why will the woman not allow me to see my son? In Stirling Castle. Deny me, the Queen I Her son Mar is with the King, in England. And she forbids me I My little Frederick-in that she-devil's clutch!"

Heriot drew a deep breath, and came to a decision. He lowered his voice, glancing towards the open dressing-room door. "Madam -have you had any word of a move to, er, take your son out of Stirling Castle?"

"What Jeg forstar ikke. Hvad er der i den? Take him? Who? When? What is this?" She leaned forward urgently, uncaring for her more fully displayed nakedness.

Satisfied that Anne, who was no dissembler nor actress, could by no means fabricate this surprise and eagerness, he went on. "Has the Master of Gray had word with Your Grace? Or the Mistress Mary, indeed?"

"Gray? Saints protect us-if that man is in it, then no good will come of it. He is, I believe, the Devil himself!"

"So I have heard others declare. Your Grace knows nothing of this?"

"How should I know? The Master of Gray does not confide his plots to me! What is it? What has my son to do with it?"

"Highness-there is someone in your dressing-room. I can hear it. What I have to say is not for other ears…"

"Mercy-it is only Henrietta! My good confidante and bedfellow." She raised her voice. "Hetty, sweeting-come. I have no secrets from Hetty." A tall, pale young woman came out, rather guiltily, her bed-robe wrapped considerably more tightly around her than was the Queen's, pretty in an anaemic way, Henrietta Stewart, Marchioness of Huntly, sister of the Duke of Lennox.

Heriot bowed. He was not as relieved as he might have been. For this young woman, brought from France to marry Scotland's premier Catholic noble, the Gordon chief, George first Marquis of Huntly, was herself strongly Catholic, a notable entertainer of Jesuits and credited with seeking to turn the Queen to the old religion. And, according to Mary Gray, the Master looked for support for his plot from the Catholics. She had even named Huntly, himself a notorious schemer.